"Fosse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... correcting the proposition—the Bastile is not an evil to be despised; but strip it of its towers, fill the fosse, unbarricade the doors, call it simply a confinement, and suppose it is some tyrant of a distemper, and not a man which holds you in it, the evil vanishes, and you bear the other half without complaint. I was interrupted in the heyday of this soliloquy, with a voice which I took to ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... as is common with attics,—in which case you can only catch a peep of that leaden canopy which infatuated Londoners call the sky,—but must be a window perpendicular, and not half blocked up by the parapets of that fosse called the gutter; and, lastly, the sight must be so humored that you cannot catch a glimpse of the pavements: if you once see the world beneath, the whole charm of that world above is destroyed. Taking it for granted that you have secured these requisites, open your window, lean your chin ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... constructed of carefully-squared stone joined with cement of such extreme hardness that the weather has had no destructive effect. The perimeter of the fortress is about 4000 yards; the shape is nearly a parallelogram. The fosse varies in depth and width, but the minimum of the former is twenty-five feet, and of the width eighty feet, but in some places it exceeds one hundred and forty. This formidable ditch is cut out of the solid ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... white steel in his fist, and then sheathed the blade, and rode down soberly over the turf bridge across the ancient fosse, and so came on to the green road made many ages before by an ancient people, and so trotted ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... my quarters for the night. In the first part I was in an infamous temper; in the second I was worried and mystified; but the cool twilight of the third stage calmed and heartened me, and I reached the gates of Fosse Manor with a mighty appetite and a ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... people were seen kneeling down, and apparently wishing them a good journey. The road now lay over an undulating country, through plantations of millet, yams, and maize, and at three hours from Laboo, led to Jannah, which was once a walled town, but the gate and fosse are all that remain of the fortifications. It is situated on a gentle declivity, commanding an extensive prospect to the westward; to the eastward the view is interrupted by thick woods. The inhabitants ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... the town and rode along the main street through groups of cheering citizens to the castle, a strong and massive fortress with ample accommodation for thousands of persons. It stood in the midst of a vast enclosure, surrounded by a deep and wide fosse; and the thick walls, as Roger remarked, appeared capable of withstanding the ...
— For The Admiral • W.J. Marx
... This wall was adorned, at regular interspaces, by square towers of white marble; the lowest sixty, and the highest one hundred and twenty cubits in height. But, in the vicinity of the gate of Benjamin, the wall arose by no means from the margin of the fosse. On the contrary, between the level of the ditch and the basement of the rampart sprang up a perpendicular cliff of two hundred and fifty cubits, forming part of the precipitous Mount Moriah. So that when Simeon and his associates arrived on the summit of the tower called Adoni-Bezek-the loftiest ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... drum beat from the great fosse under the wall, and a company of piou-pious, red-capped, red-trousered, shambled through their evolutions in a manner to break the heart of a British or a German drill-sergeant. Then out past level fields to little Vanves, with its steep streets and its old gray church, and past ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... registry took place on Friday, March 6th. Isambert, xiv. 124; La Fosse, 45, who says "Ledict edict fut publie en la salle du palais en ung vendredy, 5e [6e] de ce moys, la ou il y eut bien peu de conseillers et le president Baillet ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... espalier; fence &c. (defense) 717; pale, paling, balustrade, rail, railing, quickset hedge, park paling, circumvallation[obs3], enceinte, ring fence. barrier, barricade; gate, gateway; bent, dingle [U.S.]; door, hatch, cordon; prison &c. 752. dike, dyke, ditch, fosse[obs3], moat. V. inclose, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... dove dubito assai che la delicatezza di quelle dame non le abbia fatto fare qualche giorno di quarantena, per ispurgarsi di ogni anche piu leggiero influsso, che possa avere portato seco dell' aria di questo paese; e molto piu, se le fosse venuto il capriccio di far vedere quell' abito di veluto Corso, e quel berrettone, di cui i Corsi vogliono l'origine dagli elmi antichi, ed i Genovesi lo dicono inventato da quelli, che, rubando alla strada, non vogliano essere conosciuti: come se in tempo del loro governo avessero mai avuta ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... che 'I mio saper misura Certa fosse e infallibile di quanto Pu far l'alto Fattor della natura." Tasso, Gerus, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... service of the Engineers of Roads and Bridges, and I have been a soldier. I declare that your entrance into Paris is easy, and as a guarantee of the truth of what I say, I am about to give myself up;" so saying, he passed over the fosse by means of one of the supports of the drawbridge, in spite of several shots fired at him by Federals hidden in the houses at Auteuil, but ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... the west wind upon the bare brow of the coast. Most of these trees stood back a little from the margin of high tide, reluctant to see themselves in the water, for fear of the fate of Narcissus. But where that clandestine boat had glided into gloom and greyness, a fosse of Nature's digging, deeply lined with wood and thicket, offered snug harbourage to craft ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... reached the lull reveals itself to be but the precursor of a storm. It begins with a heave of the whole atmosphere, like the sigh of a weary strong man on turning to re-commence unusual exertion, just as I stand here in the second fosse. That which now radiates from the sky upon the scene is not so much ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... I took them on to the next village, where the gentleman got a good horse, and presently rode away with his young wife on a pillion behind him. They have gone to Nantes, where a brother of my cousin Perigord keeps an inn on the Quai La Fosse." ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach
... blue tinge lying like bloom upon the misty twilight that nils the valley—a sharp contrast to the clear darkness of the evening sky. Countisbury Camp is not far from Oldbarrow, and in Lynton there are two more ancient 'castles,' each consisting of a single fosse and rampart, and other monuments. Several stone circles, 'over forty feet in diameter,' have been wickedly removed from the Valley of Rocks 'for the purpose of selling them as gate-posts!...' Spindle-wheels, or pixie grinding-stones, ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... deeds and documents written "Bagvil" or "Baggevil," was neither more nor less than a corruption of Bacchi Villa. Axcester and its neighbourhood are rich in Roman remains—the town stands, indeed, on the old Fosse Way—and, tempted by early success, Narcissus rode his hobby further and further afield. Now, at the age of forty-two, he could claim to be an authority on the Roman occupation of Britain, and especially ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... softened vale between Slopes smooth and fair for courser's tread; Not the most timid maid need dread To give her snow-white palfrey head On that wide stubble-ground; Nor wood, nor tree, nor bush are there, Her course to intercept or scare, Nor fosse nor fence are found, Save where, from out her shattered bowers, Rise Hougomont's ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... the damozel eagerly, and then she said to me, 'This is Sir William de la Fosse, my true knight;' so the knight took my hand and seemed to have such joy of me, that all the blood came up to my ...
— The World of Romance - being Contributions to The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856 • William Morris
... Danes covered themselves with their shields and rushed forward with the greatest determination, pouring through the gap in the outer bank in a solid mass, and then turned along the fosse towards the inner gate. Closely packed together, with their shields above their heads forming a sort of testudo or roof which protected them against the Saxons' arrows, they pressed forward in spite of the shower of missiles with which ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... of the town, although useless against cannon, are considered by the Arabs as impregnable. The walls are of solid mud and sun-baked bricks, carefully loopholed for musketry, while a deep fosse, by which it is surrounded, is a safeguard against a ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... gran differenza sarebbe se fosse stata commessa la cosa o al S. Cardinale, o alli Serenissimi Principi.—Ormaneto to Priuli, July ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude |
